Kirstin Lamb
Floral Remix

I make labor-intensive images of labor-intensive textiles and wallpapers.

These paintings encompass hybrid embroidery, cross stitch, collage and digital mark-making.  I make a layered digital collage, using current and past paintings and patterns, and I cut and chop them, drawing in new marks and scribbles. I feel these are the most expressive and abstract of the work I have made, allowing me to play with calligraphic mark-making and humor.

Though these paintings read as expressive, much of the work in making them is deeply tactical and repetitive.  The paintings are made from an earlier body of work, my embroidery paintings, which were made using a printed gridded pattern. To make those works, some of which are included in this show, I paint images that are not already patterns by generating a digitized grid from which I paint each stitch by hand with acrylic and acrylic gouache on a wet media acetate. This is a simple process of re-painting a textile or pattern, sometimes an invented image-generated textile, sometimes an actual knit or textile pattern (cross stitch or embroidery). The brush creates a one-to-one relationship of mark to stitch; each mark stands in for a move of the needle.

For this new work, the embroidery paintings were photographed or scanned and used as a base for compositions, combined and remixed with vintage wallpapers, cross stitch patterns and digital drawings. Remix itself is defined as using a machine or computer to change, improve or recombine different parts of a musical composition or orchestration.  I use remix in my visual context to signify the reuse of feminine lapcraft, decorative design and digital traces of my own past work.  This digital collage leaves the computer when it is printed on canvas and I proceeded to paint the surface almost to completion, leaving a bit of the digital marks available on the surface.  I am interested in reasserting the authorship of my paintings through the labor and failure of my hand over the perfection of the digital object.

Parts of this series are generated from images of French wall decoration made following the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the late 1700s.  These works were deliberately cropped from texts discussing the shift in pattern before and after the discovery of those ruins, and the elaborate color and design shifts that occurred after the unearthing of the frescos. I am interested in the power engendered by pointing back to antiquity in times of struggle or trouble, and what that means in decoration. I am curious about the relationship of later popular decoration to this earlier format, and find that I mine a large range of textiles and wallpapers for my work, partially as I seek to tie together disparate influences in my visual history, to sort them through. The re-presenting of many of the motifs hopefully begins to suggest the darker uses of antiquity and decoration more broadly as a stand in for beauty and power.